This is a very readable social history of women's experience in New England in the period after the Revolutionary War but before the heyday of the Industrial Revolution. I think Cott does a good job of interpreting women's lives within the context of the period, rather than measuring them against later 20th century values when the book was written. Despite the seemly fixed domestic sphere that women operated in, it was a time of change. It is this change, that I was particularly interested in. ( )

Wikipedia in English (2)

This twentieth anniversary edition of Nancy F. Cott's acclaimed study includes a new preface in which Cott assesses her own and other historians' development of the concept of domesticity, from the 1970s to the 1990s.

"Nancy Cott's Bonds of Womanhood is not just a pioneer work in women's history. It is a classic. Despite all the work published since, it is still an essential starting place for understanding New England in the early republic". -- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

"Cott, still the best historian of women's bonds and bondage, foresaw twenty years ago the tendency of domesticity's bonds to lead both to feminism and the far right. An essential book for understanding today's women. -- Carolyn Heilbrun